Week 9- Box Cover

When designing my game box cover, I looked at multiple box covers comparing and contrasting each one to decide what I think would work well for my specific box and what I would not want to use for my box. I truly can say I did not know what I wanted to design my box around until I started working looking at both the box covers and my own personal game. After looking at all of the boxes I decided that I wanted to incorporate my name into my illustrations, but also be sure that my name was very clear. I decided this because I felt that every game that had a clear name but was also surrounded by other things that represent the game made it such as Cranium, War of Terror and LIFE. To create my box I had to copy the box cover cut out and open it in adobe illustrator. Next I started to design my box. I knew I wanted to incorporate the leprechaun because it is the main thing on my board that represents the Irish theme. I then started creating a rainbow with a pot of gold at the end because that is the main point of my game, to be the first to get tot the pot of gold. I did this by making a U shape on adobe illustrator using the pen tool. I then created each layer under that doing the same thing but with smaller margins. I used the fill and decided the color about each level of the rainbow. I next wanted to draw a cloud underneath the rainbow to put the name of the game in. I did this by making small U shapes and making the cloud long and skinny.  I filled it in white and used a blue outline to emphasize that it was a cloud. FInally I added the name of the game onto each side of the box. I thought it could use a little more of an Irish theme so I traced a shamrock and shrunk it to fit on each side of the name of the game.

Week 8- Gameboard pieces

For my game board pieces, I chose to stick with the same piece with different cut outs in between so that each player can tell the difference between one another. I decided to do horseshoes because my game is a fictional Irish theme and with many fictional things relating to Ireland, horseshoes are very common to see. I do not have any of these in my game so I decided that adding them as pieces would be a great compliment to the game. I made these pieces by fist taking a picture of a real horseshoe that I liked the shape of, and tracing it by using the pen tool. I then copied the finished horseshoe and repeated it 3 more times. After doing this, I had to decide how I wanted to show that each piece was different. I saw a lot of horseshoes with lines, circles, or even letters cut out of them, so that made me decide to make each piece unique by making the cut outs different. For the first one I just stuck with regular circles because this is what I saw on most horseshoes. I then decided to get creative and I took a picture of a shamrock and a leprechaun hat and I traced them both using the pen tool, then shrunk them to size so that they would fit into the horseshoe comfortably. The last cutout I made was the star cut out. I used this cut out because stars are also used frequently when addressing fictional Irish themes. Lastly, I made a base for each horseshoe so that they can stand upright on my finished game board.

Week 7- Final Gameboard

This is my final copy of my game board. I first started by changing the colors of the spaces from gradient to a normal light green because it contrasts the shamrocks and gold coins very well. Next I deleted many of my spaces to make more room for the graphics that I had in mind. I used the ellipse tool to create the golden coins and used the pen tool to create the pot of gold. I then used a photo of a leprechaun to trace a hat. I colored that green and places a buckle on top. At first I didn't even have the leprechaun in there because tracing a human leprechaun wasn't working out in my favor, so after multiple failures I decided to try and create one myself with the pen tool. I did this by first creating the face and adding the orange hair using the pen tool, I then made one eye and just copy and pasted it to create the other. I created the Irish flag by making a rectangle and separating it up into 3 pieces, then colored each spot using the eyedropper tool. Lastly, I took Nathan's advice and created my rainbow so that it can be part of the game. When someone lands on a shamrock or gold coin, they chose a card and within those cards there will be directions telling the people playing to either ride a certain color forward or ride it all the way back to square 10. This game was very interesting but very challenging for me to make, however I am very happy with my final product.

Week 6- Gameboard Second Draft

In this game board I started to add color. I used a green gradient fill for my spaces because I decided I wanted to make my game board an Irish theme. I then used just a regular color fill for the spaces that I wanted to put the shamrocks on. For the shamrocks, I used the pencil tool to draw them. This took me a while because using the pencil tool on the computer can be very challenging because you are using a mouse, not your hands. I should have elaborated more on my theme because it is not truly clear what I was trying to go for which is why I decided to make some changes in my final copy.

Week 4-Gameboard First Draft

This is my first draft of the game board that we were creating in class. This is a very plain colored piece because this is when we were first learning how to create the spaces on the game board, repeat the spaces and add numbers. At first we needed to create 63 spaces so it was difficult to make room for so many spaces and make it look halfway decent, but I tried to do a traditional board game type where the spaces move slowly inward to the finish line. Learning this was a little bit difficult because it was something new, which is why there is no color. Overall this project became easier as you got the hang of it

Week 5- Goose

This is the goose that we worked on in class Monday and Wednesday. Although this was a challenging item to make, I actually started to get the hang of how to trace items! I did not know how to use the pen tool to make edges and curves before and now I can very easily trace small indents. To color each section you would have to split each shape into layers which was challenging but after you got the hang of it, it started working out very easily. I think from here on out tracing real life objects will be something that comes as second nature and hopefully I can expand on my knowledge on this and make things look even more realistic!

Midterm

While visiting the art exhibit made by Edyta Stepien, I thought it was extraordinary. Edyta had 3 pieces of art, all from film, and all moving pieces. The main piece was called "Nonphenomena" which was a video that played on 2 full walls. While watching this my first thoughts were that it was a very dark looking video which looked like some sort of storm or the inside of a tornado of some type. There were a lot of items that were visible to the naked eye such as tumbleweed, branches, twigs, newspaper, ect. This piece was very confusing to me at first because I did not truly understand it, although I did think it was beautiful. The video gave me sort of a sad, lonely type feeling because it was very dark and the pace would go from extremely chaotic to very calm, which also  confused me.

 Next there were two pieces that were constantly moving. There were many natural colors included in both of them, a lot of green, tan, brown and grey. The grey threw me off in both pieces and actually made me very confused. The first piece was a moving circular shaped piece that was very peaceful and calming, when I was looking at this piece I thought the artist was trying to show us sort of a re-form type of art.

The next piece was similar in color and movement with the prior circular one, but it was sort of in the shape of a tree/leaf. This one seemed to be more green to me than the other one, it would stay green for a while and then as it would move, the color would start getting lighter and even reach a white color. This piece was also very peaceful to look at.

At the end of the show, we got to ask the artist multiple questions on how she created it, what she was going for, why she made what she made and what it means. Edyta made "Nonphenomena" in an aquarium and used a macrolens camera and constructed material to try and make a natural looking storm. Edyta came up with this idea around 2010 because of all of the hurricanes and earthquakes that were going on and she wanted to use this art to show how humans impact nature. To do this, she used many different things in the video to show human impact- such as newspaper. She told us that she was trying to make us feel what is happening on screen because she has always wanted to identify nature for herself and use a natural aspect with her art. Edyta did run into a few problems such as finding the equipment necessary and the space to show her artwork. She used many different things to try and create these storms such as, hairdryers, her hands, 7 projectors, mirrors, glitter, sticks, dirt, paper, sand. This took her a total of 3 weeks to complete, including editing. This was all shot in real time and she did not want to collaborating it because she thought it would feel different if she did. As for the other two, she did not speak much about them but she did say that she tried to stick with the same meaning- how humans effect nature. This is why she included greys and other colors into these natural looking pieces because they represent concrete and human effects.